


Battlements

by Himring



Category: Original Work
Genre: Family, Fantasy, Inspired by Fanfiction, Inspired by Tolkien, M/M, Siblings, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 03:39:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3104180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Himring/pseuds/Himring
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A kingdom under attack by an enemy who is worse than he seems.<br/>But the ruling family is further weakened by an act of treachery. Only is that indeed what happened?<br/>Can there be reconciliation? And, even if there is reconciliation, who will survive the enemy's onslaught?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battlements

**Author's Note:**

> I'm calling this original fiction heavily influenced by Silmarillion fan fiction rather than AU Silmarillion fan fiction partly because the original version of some passages actually antedates my first encounter with Silmarillion fan fiction.  
> This version was written in 2009 and the story is earlier than any of my Maedhros stories.
> 
> Warnings: Multiple character death. Torture: mostly by implication, but not all. Suicide: not quite. Violence: considerable, but not graphic. Sexual content: medium. Mature themes: various.

**I**

The spoon clinked in the glass.

“What I admire about you is that you seem so focussed—always prepared for anything the teachers might throw at you.  Although it’s a slightly odd combination – history and accounting, isn’t it – and martial arts at that academy in town.”

What they called martial arts in Avigdal—blunt edges, no body contact.

“You begin to wonder what it’s all for.”

He rather wondered that himself.

She put her spoon down on the saucer and looked at him. The café mirror behind him reflected his hair like a halo of silver. It was the first thing that had made her notice him in class, that striking pale blonde head of hair.

“Vigdis says you’ve got this really scary father. He runs his house like a barracks.”

Taenyo smiled.

“Vigdis says he took one look her, and she sort of melted away.”

Grey-blue eyes studied her regretfully, and she realized that she was being measured against the standards of the scary father and came up wanting, like Vigdis. It hurt, but not very much. Luckily she lacked the self-destructive impulse to dash herself against a rock face like some girls she knew. Still, she couldn’t resist a small vindictive jab.

“Do you never disobey your father, then?”

But if she’d wanted to regain his fading attention, it was a bad move. The corner of his mouth quirked upwards, but his expression had become remote, as if he was thinking of other times, other places.

“Never, except in very minor ways.”

She sighed.

“I expect it has to do with your originally being from—what was the name of the place again?”

 

**II**

 

When Taenyo returned to the house that evening, he almost immediately noticed that something had changed. He entered the hall still trying to work out what it was and found his father standing very upright in the middle of the room, as if waiting for him. Alarmed, he looked inquiringly at his father.

“I warned him. I warned him!”

Taenyo took a deep breath.

“Uncle Peorr?”

“I warned him”, his father repeated, “but he wouldn’t listen to me. The news arrived this morning. There was an ambush. It was a disaster. “

“Are you saying he’s dead?”

“I took measures right away. Luckily, I believe in being prepared. I was able to get passage for us on a ship three days from now. It won’t take us all the way there, but it will shorten the journey considerably. We’ll have to hire horses when we get there.”

“Uncle Peorr is dead? What about Maaqa? And Meilio?”

“He never did listen to me”, his father said.

Taenyo looked closely at his father. His cheeks were flushed crimson, his fists were clenched, and he was speaking in a hoarse whisper. If his father didn’t watch out, he’d have a heart attack, before he had a chance to become the patriot hero who snatched his country from the brink of oblivion. The long-awaited moment of vindication finally within his grasp—Taenyo wondered how long it would take before his father fully realized that the one person who he was longing to tell “I told you so” to his face had just had his ears stopped efficiently and completely— much more so than by mere exile.

“Three days, you said?”

He thought of his studies, formalities, forms to be filled out in triplicate. But already, in his inner ear, he heard the thud of one door falling shut after another. He would try to get any outstanding bills paid, write as many polite, apologetic letters as he could manage in the time left to him, but it wouldn’t, in the end, matter. He wasn’t coming back. They were returning to the country they’d been exiled from seven years ago, when he’d been fourteen years old. Whatever was going to happen when they got there, his degree had just become completely irrelevant.

It was lucky he hadn’t encouraged that girl, wasn’t it? Just for a bit, he’d been tempted. Still luck had nothing to do with it, really.

“Father,” he said, trying to enunciate the words very clearly and at the same time keep his tone perfectly even and polite, “what happened to Meilio and Maaqa?”

 

It was the kind of war that makes other nations sadly shake their heads and cross their fingers that it will not spill over into their territory. They regarded it as a civil war, in which they definitely did not want to get involved however much they might deplore it, and were inclined to put the blame on the royal house, who had clearly brought it on themselves.

It was true that here had been grievances, complaints of inequalities and prejudice. It was possible that their enemy had originally been a man with a grievance, even a legitimate grievance—although if it were so, there must have been gaps in their records, as they could not trace him beyond the point at which he had appeared seemingly out of nowhere to make himself the leader of a small band of rebels. Those who had seen the war up close, said that, whoever he had been, he was not a man out to right wrongs now. Those neighbours who believed that the malignancy could be contained within its original borders, even if the royal house fell, might have a rude awakening coming—but by then it would be too late for the royal house.

And perhaps there was more involved than the normal self-complacency of neighbouring nations who might be nursing their own small grudges. The enemy was quite sophisticated enough to begin disseminating propaganda at foreign courts well before the growing success of his campaigns had drawn much notice to him.  If Cousin Meilio hadn’t been so busy trying to keep the peace between Taenyo’s father and Uncle Peorr, they could have sent him abroad to look at people out of wide innocent eyes and ask: “Oppressors, us?”, and perhaps they would have had more support now. On the other hand, perhaps not. After all, they’d had fully trained, experienced diplomats, hadn’t they?

They made their way back home, by ship and overland, accompanied by Father’s smallish company of bodyguards, and nobody tried to stop them or paid any attention worth speaking of at all. In the evenings, Father made contingency plans and then contingency plans to deal with any gaps in the first set of contingency plans. None of these seemed to take any account of the fact that the soldiers he was moving back and forth over his mental chessboard were not yet even his to command.

 

“Why do you even bother?”, he’d asked Meilio.  “I’m sure the rest of us would just breathe a great sigh of relief, if your father and mine stopped speaking to each other altogether for the next ten years.”

“I can see your point”, Meilio admitted ruefully. “Unfortunately your father happens to be the country’s ablest military commander.”

“So what?”, he’d asked, baffled.

Meilio had quickly changed his expression, changed the subject—at the time he’d dismissed it as Meilio being annoying, playing at being the superior adult, when he wasn’t really so very much older. Idiot that he had been.

It hadn’t ever been about political power as such. Was that surprising, considering the history of royal houses? Father had simply kept telling Uncle Peorr how to run his life, because he was sure he knew better. That Uncle Peorr was the King was incidental as far as he was concerned. That the fact that he was also right four times out of five might not be endearing would never have occurred to Father. But as it turned out, that Uncle Peorr was the King and also of choleric temperament turned out to be very germane indeed to the repercussions that ensued.

And Meilio had worked hard to prevent them—“frivolous”, “lightweight” Meilio. When Meilio finally dropped the balls he’d been trying to juggle, it had been easy to blame him for failing to do what others hadn’t even tried. If Father hadn’t gratuitously insulted Meilio that evening—but Father had probably never even realized that he’d just insulted his nephew’s intelligence. To assume that anyone who disagreed with him was either too inexperienced or too stupid to understand properly or was otherwise mentally defective came all too naturally to him.

Taenyo recalled Meilio standing behind Uncle Peorr as he pronounced their sentence of exile the next day, face chalk-white beneath his luxuriant chestnut hair, eyes wide and staring as if he’d seen a ghost, nostrils pinched. He hadn’t looked at them, hadn’t spoken.  It was Maaqa who came and saw them off and told them that of course it was all nonsense about the treason charges and he would get his father to see reason. It was Maaqa who wrote regretful letters reporting failure. He had taken Meilio’s silence personally at the time. It had been easy to be furious with Meilio during the first time of their exile. It had been so much easier to let him bear the brunt of the blame than ask his father straight out: “Just what did you say to Uncle Peorr that evening, after we left you alone together?” But would his father even have known?

 

They finally arrived at the camp where Maaqa had managed to assemble the survivors of the ambush and bring up additional troops. Taenyo dismounted when he saw Maaqa approach and watched him exchange a quick word with the captain of the patrol who had summoned him to meet them.  His cousin looked steady and in control, although rather grey in the face. Maaqa had done very well indeed really, thought Taenyo, for someone who had recently lost his father to death and his elder brother to captivity—especially considering his twin passions had always been farming and history. But then he’d had a much closer view of things during recent years, despite Father’s assiduous gathering of intelligence. Perhaps he’d seen the necessity of subordinating farming and history to more pressing matters some time ago.

Taenyo turned and saw that Father was still in the saddle. With a sinking heart, he saw Father begin putting his foot in it with Maaqa. He’d never guessed that posture alone could express so much self-righteousness.

 

Since it was clearly useless to talk to Father, he tried to talk to Maaqa.  But Maaqa was more distraught, it turned out, than he had at first appeared. It wasn’t that he treated Taenyo as being on his Father’s side. He seemed to accept Taenyo’s efforts as well-meaning but regard them as essentially unimportant—clearly Taenyo was completely out of things as far as Maaqa’s real concerns went. It made Taenyo wonder whether Maaqa would have paid even Father enough attention to resent him, if Father hadn’t been excelling himself as the proverbial bull in the china shop. 

He gave up and turned away. As he was leaving, he heard Maaqa say behind him in a stifled voice: “I’ve heard some very...ugly rumours about Meilio.”

 

**III**

It had been a flourishing province. It could have flourished even more, and there had been people with grievances. Now it was an anteroom of hell.

Everything seemed to be falling to pieces. He saw fields salted far away from where ruining the crops could have any strategic value. He saw young children roam the area in hordes and attack and kill at random. There was an acid taste on the wind. He thought the inhabitants were being honed into people that would do anything to get out of there and to whom only violent means of doing so would present themselves. 

He did not know how he had managed to survive. He had a number of cuts and bruises to show that he hadn’t managed to be as invisible as he needed to be. It was difficult to remember what he was supposed to be looking for.

 

At nightfall he found himself near a village that seemed more substantial than any he had encountered so far. He thought it probably supplied the castle on the hill at whose foot it lay. He waited until it was night; then he entered to try and steal some food. The main street of the village was broad and well kept. He crept along the walls, within the deep shadows of the eaves, and so came to the market square. There were hurdles for penning cattle stacked here and in the middle of the square a big gibbet. On the gibbet seemed to hang some kind of outsize bird, larger than any he had ever seen. Almost he ignored it in his quest for food, but it piqued his curiosity or maybe aroused a vague suspicion. He stepped out into the moonlight. The bird thing had a white face. It had eyes. They opened, and a croak emerged from its throat. It croaked again and he found that this time he could make out words: “Bright light—if he should quench you...”

He stepped closer. “Meilio”, he said. He had found his cousin, pinned sideways to the gibbet by his right hand and foot.

 

His cousin blinked, then blinked again. “Taenyo”, he said, disbelievingly. Then, quickly, urgently: “Taenyo, cut my throat and get out of here as fast as you can.”

He stared, stupidly. “I came to rescue you,” he said slowly, remembering.

“You can’t rescue me. You can’t even get me off the gibbet— and even if you could, I’m in no state to flee with you. It would take at least a week through enemy territory. I wouldn’t be able to walk even a quarter of a mile!”

It was true. There was the stink of blood and disease about Meilio.  In the moonlight he could see the slash where his cousin’s cheek had been laid open, and bits of limb seemed to be sticking out at unnatural angles.

“I came to rescue you”, he said stubbornly.

“Taenyo, don’t be silly. We don’t have time for this. We’ve got what chance we have because the guards decided I wasn’t going anywhere and sloped off to have a beer. They’ll be back, and it will be all over with both of us. Kill me now!”

It made sense. He drew his dagger. It made perfect sense, but he couldn’t do it. He’d already lost too much in this attempt. He had lost altogether too much. He sheathed the dagger again; if he used it, he would have nowhere to go. A kind of light-headedness and rage took over and, without knowing what he was going to do, he reached out and gripped Meilio’s right shoulder and said: “Repeat after me:  I, Meilio, son of Peorr, ...”.

“Taenyo, have you gone completely mad!”

But he was impervious. He forced his cousin through the bonding ritual. Then, because he couldn’t see any practical way of getting at the nails up there, he gritted his teeth, grabbed hold of Meilio and ripped him off the gibbet.

 

If the way there had been a nightmare, the way back was delirium. It wasn’t that Meilio resisted him. Once he’d given in, he’d given in completely and unflinchingly attempted to obey Taenyo’s every wish and command. But his physical condition was even worse than Taenyo had guessed; every step clearly caused him unbearable pain. Taenyo took an iron grip on his cousin’s mind, blocked out the pain altogether, pumped his own energy into the wrecked body and forced it to move. Beyond hearing, Meilio’s tortured nerves screamed and screamed. Taenyo made himself not listen.

 

They got out of there in the end. They never talked for however long it took, except for “Duck!”, “Stay down!” and “Go!”. Mostly, Taenyo didn’t permit himself to focus on his cousin’s face, but once, just once their eyes met by accident. His stomach clenched, but the question he feared— “How dare you put me through all this?”—never came. What he saw was a dirty white mask—nothing more or less enigmatic than utter exhaustion.

 

 After Meilio became incapable of even stumbling or staggering toward their destination, Taenyo half-carried, half-dragged him.  When they finally met the patrol, his father was at the head of it. “Of all the idiotic, hare-brained....!”, he began shouting, even before Taenyo had quite recognized him. Then he somehow—how?—became aware of the bond Taenyo had forged between himself and Meilio. “What have you done?!”

 

**IV**

The moment Taenyo released his grip on his cousin’s mind, Meilio collapsed altogether. At first, Taenyo was hardly better off. After what turned out to be about twelve hours of unconsciousness and another two days or so of genuine sleep, he woke up fully for the first time to find himself in his old room in the royal castle. Inexplicably transported back into the surroundings that he had been accustomed to as a boy, he felt completely disoriented and must have spent some time just staring at the familiar old crack in the ceiling—one branch left, two branches to the right, another to the left. Gradually he became aware of something tugging at him that had no place in the past, tugging at him strongly. He got up, washed, dressed, all without really thinking about it, and unerringly made his way to the chamber where Meilio lay still unconscious and feverish, surrounded, it seemed, by dozens of people. He somehow managed to throw out about half of them, then sat down by his cousin’s bedside, put his hand on his shoulder and began to pour his strength into him again, this time to aid the process of healing.

 

It proved unnecessary to tell Meilio that what had originally driven Taenyo to his unlikely rescue attempt was his gut-wrenching fear that Father would mess up really badly, if there was nobody around who knew how to handle him. As soon as he judged that Meilio might be capable of sustaining talk about political matters, he let Father and Maaqa in to see him and Meilio’s instincts took over.  It wasn’t until that moment that it occurred to Taenyo that, before their return out of Engphat, Maaqa must have thought he had as good as inherited the title, but he might as well not have considered it—Maaqa was clearly overwhelmingly relieved and only his obvious alarm at his brother’s fragile state seemed to stop him from unburdening all his worries to Meilio right away. Father, of course, had no such scruples and started making demands as soon as he opened his mouth. Taenyo permitted him to be flattered, cajoled and soothed by Meilio until he judged his cousin was getting dangerously exhausted; then he mutely appealed the Court Physician to help to edge both of them gently out of the room again.

 

A week later, he let political considerations outweigh medical ones again, and admitted more of the people who were clamouring to see the King in person. He was dumbfounded by success. Propped up on cushions but otherwise practically unable to stir a finger, visibly damaged although most of the more serious wounds were mercifully hid under the blankets, Meilio still managed to project enough reassurance to calm down a roomful of very worried people. He did it so successfully that Taenyo himself was lulled into letting them stay much longer than he should have or had planned to. The moment the door closed behind them all, Meilio’s mask slipped and, when Taenyo came to remove the cushions and ease him back down, he found him white and shaking.

“I usually try to get what I want by telling people the truth,” he muttered. “But today most of the time I didn’t know whether I was telling the truth or lying.”

“You talked to ten people today,” said Taenyo. “That was ten people more than you ought to have talked to, if it was just your health I was thinking of, and that doesn’t even take account of the fact that my father was among them.“

Meilio wasn’t listening. His teeth were beginning to chatter, and his pupils were dilated.

“Why didn’t I just tell them to run?” he whispered.

Taenyo bit his lips. “That might have to do with a lack of a good choice of places to run to”, he answered.

He slid his arm around his cousin instead of the cushions. The shaking was getting worse, not better. Meilio’s eyes looked almost black now. He felt something like terror clutch at his own heart and realized that up until this point Meilio had been physically so compromised that the horror of what he had seen and what had been done to him had been hidden, as if behind a veil of acute pain and fatigue. The effort of persuading his people not to be afraid had ripped that veil to shreds.

It was almost certainly foolish, but he could not bear for anyone but himself to see his cousin in such a state. “Go! Leave!”, he said sharply to the Court Physician, without looking around, and felt a faint surprise at hearing the man walk away and pull the door shut behind him without protest. It crossed the back of his mind that this experienced man had nevertheless been deeply disturbed by the signs of abuse on his king’s body and was grateful for an excuse to get away from the unfolding scene. But he did not have much attention to spare for the matter.

Engphat was in the room with them. The enemy was in the room with them. He held onto Meilio as if the floor was tilting away underneath. Daylight seemed to be fading more quickly than was natural, or maybe it was his eyesight that was failing. Darkness welled up, and suddenly all he could see was his cousin holding on for dear life to a tall silver and blue flame that he somehow knew was himself while a howling black vortex tried to tear him away. For a long time all he could do was blindly clutch Meilio to his chest and endure the vision. Then he made a small sound of protest—it rang oddly in his ears, like a child whimpering in its bedroom far away—and began to try to colour some of the silver-blue red. The colour would not take hold, and the vortex bellowed and sucked at his cousin’s torso like a greedy animal, trying to loosen his grip on the pillar of fire. Taenyo persisted. Time and time again he coloured the tip of the flame red. The vortex whipped it away, but gradually a streak of red did begin spreading downwards, until, finally, there were two intertwined columns, one solid and silver and blue, one red and thin as a vine, but each holding the other up, firm against the encroaching blackness. The vortex roared angrily and receded.

Taenyo opened his eyes, which he did not remember having closed. In his arms, Meilio was almost insensate, but Taenyo knew that with the remains of his consciousness he was still clinging to the image of the entwined columns and his panic had abated. He felt that his arm was a little wet and he thought muzzily that he must have squeezed Meilio’s shoulders too hard, and some of the scars on his back had doubtless reopened. It would be only superficial bleeding; he was too exhausted to be concerned. He tried to loosen his arm and found that it had cramped rock-hard in its position. It was night, real night now, and they must have been sitting there in the same position for hours. He lowered Meilio as gently as he could into the pillows, clambered clumsily into the bed beside him, and fell fast asleep without another thought.

 

When he awoke in the grey light of dawn, Meilio was already awake, looking very weak and rather bleached, but apparently sane. He seemed, however, deep in unhappy thought and didn’t immediately notice that Taenyo had propped himself up on his elbow and was peering worriedly into his face.

“I’m sorry”, he said then.

“I’m not unscathed, you know”, said Taenyo and then wondered what had made him say that.

“I’m sorry,” Meilio repeated. “I don’t know what your father told you. Told you about that evening, I mean. I was like you really, you know, I didn’t expect anything dramatic to happen. It just seemed the usual run of things, Uncle pontificating, Father in a towering rage, myself sulking by the window—just an ordinary evening in the bosom of the family. I guess when it’s your own family, you’re less likely to notice... I missed the danger signs completely. I was paying so little attention that I might not even have been watching, but I was. I was looking straight at Father as he whipped out his dagger from his belt and went straight for Uncle’s throat. Of course, Uncle wouldn’t be the military genius he is, if his reflexes hadn’t kicked in and he’d swiped the blade aside before it even nicked his skin—in spite of his being completely unprepared for an attack. I don’t think he believed it was happening. I’m not sure he even realized what had happened after it was over. Perhaps he thought it was just Father being silly and carelessly waving around sharp-edged tools. At any rate, he said something very Uncle-like and stormed off in high dudgeon, leaving Father and myself staring at each other.

I knew Father had really meant to kill him, and Father knew I knew—and in that moment I saw my father go insane before my eyes. I don’t suppose you realize that Father really believed those ridiculous charges of treason; after all nobody else did. But Father needed to believe them. It was imperative that he should have had a genuine reason for attacking Uncle, and I suppose deep down he felt that Uncle had really betrayed him by provoking the attack on himself. Myself, too,—I’d conspired to betray him just by being there and being a witness. I was convinced then, and I still think, that we were all on the brink of being executed for treason, Uncle, myself, and you and your mother for good measure, just to help conceal what it was that Father was trying to conceal. I didn’t know what do—and so I pretended to believe in the conspiracy, swearing that I was innocent myself and pleading for mercy for Uncle in spite of his alleged treasonous intentions. It was I who suggested exile rather than execution, and Father grasped at the suggestion—with the remains of his sanity, I guess, he was relieved to be spared the necessity for royal murder.

I didn’t dare to warn Uncle, of course. I didn’t dare to talk to anyone, you or your mother or Maaqa, for if Father had caught me communicating with you or daring to betray his secret, he would have decided I was guilty of treason after all, and we would all have been sent to the block. Maaqa was utterly bewildered, both by Father’s behaviour and by mine, but I thought his obvious cluelessness about what had really happened was his best protection, so I never told him anything. I think eventually he may have guessed a little... Anyway, by then I was ashamed of Father’s secret almost as if it had been my own.

There must have been something better that I could have done. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Taenyo.”

He’d recounted the whole story with his eyes fixed steadily in front of him, as if he could still see Uncle Peorr standing there with the dagger in his hand, and never once looked Taenyo in the eyes. Almost Taenyo could see him standing there, too, and he nearly forgot to breathe.

There was a long silence. Then Taenyo said weakly: “Well, it’s good to be finally told these things, but”, he went on more strongly, astonished at his own effrontery, “you’re still only peering back into your own shadows. Look at me.” He leaned forward. “Look at me!”

The tired, red-rimmed eyes shifted and re-focussed. With the force of a blow, Taenyo felt a rush of shared memories invading him along the channel he’d used so far mainly to dominate Meilio. Memories of Meilio picking him up when he’d fallen down and barked his knee, memories of Meilio trying to mend his broken toys, memories of Meilio putting him to bed and reading bedtime stories to keep away the fear of the dark. In between that, almost as if they and the memories were the same thing, came light anxious brushes of Meilio’s mind against his, as if he was trying to find out all the hurts and bruises Taenyo had suffered since their childhood but could not bring himself to probe too deeply for fear of opening them up again. And beneath that, Taenyo sensed that deep underlying conviction of the preciousness of the silver-and-blue flame. 

“Do not doubt that I love you even when I doubt myself”, Meilio whispered.

“Oh, I won’t”, said Taenyo, tears pricking his eyelids, “not now.”

 

They fell asleep again, after that. Once or twice the physician must have looked in on them, Taenyo thought, to check they were all right, but he could not remember. When he next awoke, it was, embarrassingly, with an erection touching his cousin’s thigh. Meilio, looking a little less ill than a couple of hours before, smiled at him. “I’m afraid I cannot help you with that...yet?”

Taenyo looked at him wonderingly and remembered a long-forgotten day, a lazy sunny afternoon out on the lake at Caoinear when he’d finally dared to ask Meilio about girls and Meilio had helped him experiment with his own body, because he was so afraid of making a fool of himself the first time. He moved over and tentatively brushed Meilio’s bruised mouth with his lips. Then he quickly got up and went and leaned against the inside of the bathroom door. His knees felt like water. Such a small thing—but perhaps not. Married people rarely bonded, but no self-respecting woman would marry someone who had bonded with someone else. He had given up his chance of marriage and legitimate children when he forced the bond on Meilio. It was one of the reasons why his father was so infuriated by it. But it looked as if there might be going to be compensations.

 

**V**

When Meilio’s health stabilized, he started to insist that Taenyo should go and get a breath of fresh air and a bit of exercise. “If I am to leech on you,” he said, “I have to take care that you stay fit for it”, and shooed Taenyo out of the door.

His father cornered him as he was leaning against the battlements, gazing out toward Engphat. He supposed the confrontation was inevitable; he shouldn’t have tried to dodge it.

“You are in love with him, not just bonded to him!”, his father said accusingly.

It was not the line of attack Taenyo had expected. “Yes..., well... It’s not quite unexpected, is it? Under the circumstances.”

“Were you in love with him before?”

Uncle Peorr wasn’t the only one with a hyper-sensitive nose for treachery.

“A little, I suppose. A lot of us were a little in love with Meilio, then—just as a lot of people were a little in love with Uncle Peorr.”

He saw his father’s look of pained outrage.

“Not you, of course—you were always quite immune to royal charisma and all that. But,” he added quickly before his father could annihilate him with a crushing response, “nevertheless I didn’t hanker after Meilio in Avigdal as you hankered after Uncle Peorr. If we’d stayed there, I guess Meilio would just have been someone who used to be my favourite cousin. Of course, the matter of our exile was never as personal for me as for you...” Certainly never as personal as a dagger aimed at his throat... Oh gods.

“I hoped that bringing Meilio back might help you make your peace with Uncle Peorr’s memory, but that hasn’t worked too well, has it?”

His father was looking at him thunder-struck, as if a cat had sat up and barked. Taenyo was conscious of how that would once have constituted quite a worthwhile achievement. Sadly, it was rather irrelevant now.

He quietly went back to Meilio’s room, picked up the glass of water from the bedside table and offered him a drink. Meilio took one look at his face and said: “Put that down.” Then he carefully reached out his splinted arm and gently nudged Taenyo’s face against his shoulder. “It doesn’t hurt that much,” Taenyo protested, surprised. “You could have fooled me”, Meilio said. Taenyo became aware of the tears clinging to his eyelashes. “No, I was fooling myself”, he said.

 

Characteristically, Maaqa gave him several days before he approached him and what came then was not in the nature of an attack. He joined Taenyo on the battlements and for several minutes they stood side by side, staring out towards Engphat together. That was becoming a bad habit, one Taenyo would need to give up pretty soon. Maaqa said: “I was in command of the rearguard, you know. When Father gave me the command, Meilio teased me a little, saying: ‘That should keep you out of trouble.’ I was a bit angry then, because it’s well known that I don’t like fighting much and some people have doubted my courage. Not Meilio, though—when I snapped at him, he looked a bit hurt and said: ‘Well, I can’t help being glad that you’ll be relatively safe, but if anything happens to Father and me, you’ll have the tougher job, you know. You’ll have to pick up the pieces and hold it all together.’ He couldn’t have known at the time, of course. But when we did end up in that ambush, I remembered. I stopped my troops from charging right into the trap after the others... It was difficult...”

“I’m sure it was”, said Taenyo.

“It was my responsibility, you see. I had been entrusted with them.”

Taenyo thought about this. 

“Maaqa, you’re not apologizing for not rescuing Meilio yourself, are you?”

But it seemed Maaqa was.

“Maaqa! Of course you couldn’t have! You were the regent, you had the whole country to protect, you’ve got a family... Haven’t you heard what Father said? It was a completely hare-brained idea to go and try it! The only one who could have gone was someone like me—no ties, dispensable...”

“Your father...,” Maaqa began, but Taenyo was no longer listening. He’d felt a sudden sharp tug and said: “Sorry, Maaqa, I have to go; he needs me...”

 

He found that Meilio had tried to get to the toilet by himself and collapsed on the floor. “Idiot,” said Taenyo forcefully. Meilio grimaced.  “I was only too glad to have you get rid of as many people around me as possible,” he said, “but allowing you to try and do it all by yourself was a mistake. We’ll have to get somebody else in.” Taenyo grabbed his shoulder. “No!”, he said, “You’re mine.” Had he really just said that out loud?  

Meilio was looking at him open-mouthed, incredulous. “Taenyo! We are talking about emptying bed-pans, not sexual favours!” Then he flushed hotly. “I still don’t know how I had the nerve to proposition you”, he muttered.  

Taenyo let his breath out very carefully. “You don’t?” he said lightly. “Then maybe I wasn’t forward and demanding enough.” Meilio’s eyebrows seemed to be trying climb up into his hair line; it was almost funny.

“Well, if you’d like to be forward and demanding, do go ahead and be my guest.” They stared at each other for a moment. 

Then Taenyo said abruptly: “Let’s get you off the floor and cleaned up first.”

That proved to be an exhausting and rather agonizing procedure. By the time Meilio was washed and changed and Taenyo had finished scrubbing the floor, Meilio looked very pale indeed. He lay very quiet and straight under the blankets, his eyes half-closed. Both relieved and disappointed, Taenyo decided that he was probably about to fall asleep.

However, he seemed to sense Taenyo bending over him, opened his eyes and looked at him expectantly, like a child waiting for its bedtime story.  His eyes looked huge in his still emaciated face. Taenyo gave an inward sigh. He might just have bodily hauled Meilio off the floor and done painful and embarrassing things to him, but now he was afraid to even breathe too hard on his cousin, for fear he might disintegrate into a pile of shining dust.

He lowered himself cautiously onto the edge of the bed. “Close your eyes”, he said. Meilio obediently closed them. “We are staying in the lodge at Caoinear”, Taenyo went on. “It’s a moonlit night and I can’t sleep, so I get up and go to your room and find you asleep in bed.” He took a quick look at Meilio’s face. His eyes were still closed; his face seemed relaxed. “I bend over you and brush my lips across your face, your eyes, your cheeks, your lips, and you smile, not quite awake, as if you’ve been dreaming of me and this is part of your dream. I put my arms on your shoulders and kiss you again and you wake up fully, take me in your arms and turn me around onto the bed and kiss me so passionately that my back arches and I almost come right then and there and you whisper in my ear and say...”

He couldn’t go on. His tongue was hot and heavy in his mouth.

Meilio opened his eyes. “And say what?”

Taenyo shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten.”

“You’re wonderful?”, Meilio suggested. There was a tiny smile lurking in the corner of his mouth.

Taenyo blushed more deeply. “You’re only saying that because you know I want to hear it.” He winced at his own words; how ridiculous was he going to get?

“If I’d known you wanted to hear it, I’d have said it before”, Meilio pointed out. He paused and frowned uncertainly. “Is this the dream you had two nights ago?”

“You know about that.” Maybe somewhere there was hole he could crawl into. Or maybe it would save time if he just curled up and died on the spot.

“I was awake, yes. I wondered whether it was a girl in Avigdal you were dreaming about. I was... jealous.”

“There were one or two girls in Avigdal.” Vigdis and—surely he couldn’t have forgotten her name? It would come to him in a moment. “I wouldn’t be dreaming about them now.”

“Oh.”

Meilio closed his eyes again for a moment. Then he looked at Taenyo, very seriously.

Oh no—he was going to say that he was very sorry, but it was all a mistake.

“I’m afraid Caoinear doesn’t look at all like you remember it these days. I’ll have to try and see whether I can rebuild it for you.”

 

**VI**

 

It was to be supposed that the enemy had left Meilio’s eyes intact mainly so that he could see what was going to hurt him next. His mouth must have been largely unharmed just in case any more information was needed. But it was useful that the face healed well, the slash across the cheek leaving only a very faint scar. The chestnut hair grew back abundantly, discreetly covering any traces of damage beneath it. Much could also be concealed by a sweeping high-necked robe with flowing sleeves and, if necessary, a glove.   The fractures of the left underarm healed nicely and only ached in bad weather. It was a pity that the right hand had been lost to gangrene, but he was lucky only to lose that and a couple of toes. There was a pronounced limp; it could be visually compensated for by an ornate staff of ebony, located somewhere at the back of the treasury by a devoted servant and carefully polished to a shine. Later he would be able to sit astride a horse to be paraded in town. Surely against his intentions, the enemy had left Meilio in possession of a body viable for the uses he needed to put them to. He didn’t need to be able to fight, he needed to be able to represent.

 

“Sometimes I can almost hear you telling me to find a nice girl.”

“Is that what your father said? I don’t think I’d be that specific about gender... or age.”

“I’m of age. Even Father admits it, these days. What you really mean, of course, is find anybody except my crippled, sometimes depressed cousin.”

“Sometimes depressed?”

“All right, sometimes terminally depressed.  What you fail to see, you know, is what an exotic, romantic couple the two of us make. That breath of scandal! Through you, I’ve finally achieved my ambition to become a collectible item. Have you noticed the acquisitive look in Lady Solfindar’s eyes?”

“I was hoping you hadn’t noticed it.”

“Are you saying that she’s not the kind of healthy young woman who would be so much better for me than your battered self? Oh my dear... Never mind.

Look, don’t worry about it. Or if you have to, don’t worry about it, until you’ve finished sorting all that out with Father and Maaqa—you know”, beginning to count off on his fingers, “the riders, the captains, the horses, the stables, the tackle, the fodder ...”

“Stop! Stop!”

Laughing, finally, trying to catch his fingers in the fingers of his one hand.

 

“No way!”

“No way what?”

“No way am I going to let you give me a post that will leave me on average three days’ ride away from you. You’re just doing it to satisfy Father—no, don’t say it, you’re perfectly capable of coming up with silly notions on your own. You both think our bond is ruining my career. That’s a pretty strange notion to have, you know, when on some days our country seems to be going down the drain so quickly it makes you dizzy to watch.

Admit you need me, will you? If I get a post that separates me from you all the time, I’ll do a lousy job. I’ll be constantly dropping everything to rush home to help you at the first hint of trouble.

If you must give me some kind of title, make me your Chief Herald. Better still, captain of your bodyguard.”

“Both, then.”

“Both? Not afraid of overworking me, are you?”

“We’ll get you a good second-in-command—two good second-in-commands. It will need a combination of both titles to satisfy your father...  Don’t look like that. Please—help me pacify my ablest general?”

Trademark warm persuasive smile.

“Anyway, you’re really already doing these things, aren’t you?”

“I know that smile of yours. It says you want something and you’re going to get it.”

“And?”

“You’ve got it.”

 

Would it have made a difference if he’d hopped into bed with anyone else? When all he needed to do was to close his eyes and relax into the bond and know intimately a lot of what Meilio felt and even pick up a little of his thoughts? That was dangerously seductive certainly, illogically so; at best, it meant acquiring a cluster of ghost aches and pains and the feeling of low overhanging thunder clouds that represented Meilio’s memories and fears for the future.

There had been a very bad night when he’d been too far away physically to get back in time to help.  Meilio had spent most of those hours climbing ceaselessly up and down the tower stairs until his bad leg collapsed under him, then dragged himself into a window embrasure and pressed his face against the rough mortar. Taenyo, trying to calm him through the bond, had become too absorbed in his task, busy trying to steady the straining heart beat, reminding the convulsing lungs too breathe. He couldn’t bring himself to leave and lingered, becalmed, caught up in the slowing rhythms of Meilio’s body, until Meilio himself, regretfully but firmly, shoved him out, after they had heard the cock crow for the second time. Taenyo had woken up miles away in his tent, with the father and mother of all headaches. It completely incapacitated him for the rest of the day and hung around for a week.

Since then he’d made rules for himself, restricting himself to what he called preliminary damage assessment and emergency repairs when they were apart. When they were together, he preferred to work by guessing rather than intuition. A quick light touch on the elbow or the shoulder during the day—a small boost overriding threatening pain, exhaustion or despondency. In the evening, in private, just a little psychic oomph added to more conventional aids to soothing or relaxation—kneading knotted shoulders or simply holding hands.

There were times when running his hands lightly over Meilio’s skin and hearing his breath catch was reassuringly normal, refreshingly mundane. But that was never all it was. Of all of them, it was Meilio who was most visibly marked by the tide of violence that had swept over them and yet, for Taenyo, he encompassed all he could now imagine of peace. Sometimes, in the middle of a casual conversation, he would capture Meilio’s wrist just to feel the slight reverberation of his pulse under his fingers. Impossible to want to be anywhere else.

 

And Meilio smiling. Smiling encouragingly at people he was asking to do terribly difficult things so that they went away feeling that they might not be impossible and sometimes even did them. Smiling when, inevitably, failures occurred through nobody’s fault; his smile refused to apportion blame and made the failures seem less disastrous than they were. More and more, smiling dazzlingly grateful smiles and sharing out largely imaginary honours for faithful service, as the war effort rapidly emptied the treasury and trade increasingly failed to bring in new revenues.

His patience seldom frayed, never snapped. “Are you still punishing yourself for the one time you lost your temper with Father?”— one of the few questions he simply refused to answer.

He seldom made suggestions. Most of those came from Father and Maaqa and his advisers, also the staff, even, occasionally, from Taenyo. But his brain was constantly at work processing them, assimilating advantages and disadvantages, requirements and costs. Sometimes he would translate the whole plan into different terms for the benefit of others, so that it could be understood from another point of view. More and more he had to work out compromises as his hard-pressed councillors began to clash over the use of dwindling resources.

The smiles did work. They worked most of the time. Even on Father, although now and then inevitably the moment would come when Father found he had consented to something he had not suggested himself and would glare at Meilio suspiciously and stomp off in a huff.

 

Recurring patterns: whenever Taenyo returned from delivering the King’s messages, even after a short absence, Meilio would have got the servants to organize for him any minor luxury that was going: a slightly better quality of wine, a warmer cloak, peach preserve—never extravagant enough to elicit more than casual notice by anyone else or raise eyebrows. As soon as there was a chance of privacy, he would happily give the servants leave of absence. If he had a moment’s peace, he would try to find a small task to do for Taenyo’s benefit, severely circumscribed as the possibilities were by the lack of two hands. “Let me?”, he would murmur and take up the comb to try and disentangle Taenyo’s wind-tousled hair.

It would only be later, occasionally even much later, that there would come that slight familiar hesitation, as of a transgression about to be perpetrated, followed by a brief shudder of relief and gratitude, as he eased into the embrace that was sometimes just a long slow caress and sometimes led on to other things. When they were apart, he contented himself with the briefest of mental contacts, barely enough to reassure himself that Taenyo was alive and in possession of his faculties. How often he needed to do so was as good an indicator of his current level of anxiety as any.

 

The day Meilio laughed aloud in public. They were crossing the courtyard. Taenyo dodged an unexpectedly shying horse, slipped on some slimy cobbles, and fell headlong across the corner of the dung heap. He scrambled to his knees, dripping, his pride stinging, and looked up to see Meilio, of all people, laughing himself silly about his mishap. He had just taken a deep breath to begin yelling at him, when Meilio, still laughing, bent down towards him, put his arm around his waist, pulled him up and hugged him tightly, dung and all. Taenyo felt the tremors of laughter running through his body. “I love you so much,” Meilio said a little breathlessly—for once oblivious of onlookers and anyone who might overhear.  

It took Taenyo’s own breath away, and he heard his voice, high with surprise, answer: “You’re welcome. I didn’t realize I was doing anything clever. Would you like me to do it again?”

After that, of course, they both had to go and change their clothes.

 

They were, for once, alone together during the daylight hours, Meilio in his study, seated at his desk, carefully forming letters with the pen in his left hand, Taenyo guarding the door. There was another guard down the corridor, almost out of sight. Taenyo stood quite still.

He heard Meilio hesitate, put down the pen, and get up. “Taenyo, what is it?”

“It’s just fear”, he said, without looking around, maintaining his watch of the corridor. There was the taste of shame in his mouth. “Not even fear of anything in particular.”

“Maybe you’re stumped for choice of what to fear”, said Meilio. He didn’t say anything else, but remained standing just behind Taenyo, not touching him, neither moving towards him nor away. Gradually, the fear became something outside Taenyo, something to be dealt with, like cold weather.  He felt Meilio’s presence warming his back, like a fire on the hearth.

“Thank you”, he said.

Meilio stood there a moment longer. Then he quietly went back to the desk and resumed writing.

 

Taenyo found the bond less of a physical strain than either his father assumed or Meilio feared. But he was nevertheless surprised, when Maaqa reminded him that it was his birthday and he noticed that he was still only twenty-two. But then, he had spent his twenty-first birthday in Avigdal and Avigdal was a lifetime away in more ways than one, he thought, looking at a grave that Maaqa’s men had just dug for three fugitive children who had died before food and medical care could reach them.

They skipped the birthday party.

 

**VII**

 

When it became clear that the decisive battle approached—and it was something of a miracle that there was to be a decisive battle, probably proof that Taenyo’s father was precisely the genius he thought he was, as Meilio made sure to point out—Maaqa stayed behind one day after the other councillors had left. He had, in fact, started to leave, hesitated and turned back.

“Any problems, Maaqa? Something you forgot to mention?”, asked Meilio. It was just the three of them in the darkening hall now, Meilio, Taenyo and Maaqa.

“No”, said Maaqa, still hesitant.

Meilio waited. Taenyo stood quietly behind him, as usual.

“I never asked”, said Maaqa. “Taenyo seemed able to handle it and I was very grateful that he could. I’ve always been afraid that if I knew exactly what he had done to you, I’d be petrified—too terrified to fight. My wife, my children...”

Maaqa’s wife and two-year-old twins had been ensconced in a remote mountain keep for more than a year, together with the crown jewels and much of the royal archive. It was the safest place in the kingdom— which, of course, was to say: not very safe at all.

“Don’t worry about it”, said Meilio. “You know all you need to know, Maaqa. Taenyo and I don’t talk about it either; he knows what he knows because he saw...”

He got up slowly from the large hard wooden chair that functioned as the throne in this room. “You and your children are the future, Maaqa. Uncle and I and, through both of us, Taenyo, we’re all too much ensnarled in past disasters. I want you and your children to live free of them.”

Maaqa regarded him broodingly. “You’re all the mother I had,” he said. “It seems you can’t break yourself of the need to protect me, just as I can’t break myself of needing your protection.”

“You’re my pride and joy,” said Meilio unblushingly. “Always.”

Once again, he was trying to get other people to do what he wanted by telling them the truth, thought Taenyo.

Maaqa frowned at Meilio a moment longer; then he gave him a rather wistful grin. It lit up his usually sombre face to an astonishing degree.

Their way to the battlefield would take them past Caoinear.

 

Taenyo’s old room was stripped of all its furnishings. There was a hole in the roof through which the dusk filtered in. Meilio stood beneath it, looking at the soot that stained the wall. “I’m sorry, I never had the chance to do anything about it.” He began to turn towards Taenyo. “Do you...?” Taenyo kissed him, quickly, so that he wouldn’t need to finish framing the question.

They made love on a pile of blankets in the far corner, very quietly, conscious of the guard outside the gaping window and the other outside the broken door.

 

There was some pretence of negotiations and, for the first time, Taenyo saw their enemy face to face. He was small and slim. When he entered the tent, Taenyo realized two things: unlike Maaqa and in spite of everything he had seen and heard, he had not really believed the rumours of more than human malice—and he believed them now. He was standing a little behind Meilio, within arm’s reach, and, instinctively, his hand went out to his elbow in that habitual light touch, this time as much to reassure himself as Meilio. He found himself blocked. The bond was not severed, but seemed to be rendered impermeable for the moment. It was hard even to physically touch his cousin. He met the knowing eyes of the enemy, and his hand dropped away. There was a rushing sound in his head. He missed the first exchange of words altogether.

 The enemy looked delighted to see Meilio; his smile was terrifying. But Meilio, of all of them, seemed the most unfazed. It was as if memory and fear had magnified even the terror of this black sorcerer, who had tortured him physically and mentally and now leaned on their bond with his dark knowledge, and made him less frightening in actuality than in anticipation. The others saw Meilio unbowed and took heart.

Of course, the negotiations quickly ground to a halt nevertheless, as expected. As he left, the enemy laughed and said: “Well done, Meilio, I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you! But you know there’s no point to it, do you? You’ll soon be my guest again and you’ll find it harder to leave my hospitality this time...” Then he looked at Taenyo and said: “I’m sorry I wasn’t in the last time you called. I’ll be sure not to make that mistake again.” Taenyo was grateful that he wasn’t required to answer that. Thank the gods for protocol.

 

It was a near-run thing. They had known it would be, and that was when they were being optimistic, but they had the military genius of Taenyo’s father to pit against the malice of the enemy, and it was just enough. Before the end, the enemy’s forces penetrated the bodyguard of the king and Taenyo was drawn into fighting hand-to-hand, hoping that Meilio was still somehow safe behind his back.  After that had gone on for quite a while, he tired and became just a little bit too slow...

 

He must have passed out for a short time and woke to find himself lying on his back. One of the surviving guards was checking the wounds in his left side. On the other side of him knelt Meilio, holding his hand, and down Taenyo’s right arm welled fizzing red warmth which seemed to be frantically pushing at him, trying to mend him.

The guard shook his head. “That’s at least one major artery”, he said, “and he’s losing even more blood than that.”

Taenyo wasn’t surprised. He’d suspected something like that when the blade went in.

“You’d better close that off”, he said absent-mindedly to Meilio. “You can’t stop me bleeding to death that way; you’re just wasting your energy.”

There was a short silence. Meilio carefully put down his hand. The fizzing red warmth didn’t abate.

“Taenyo, I don’t think I can. I know that some bonded survive, alone... But I don’t think they’d used their bond as much as we did.”

It had always been a corollary, that if he died, Meilio would almost certainly die, too. He couldn’t think how he’d managed to forget—but suddenly it seemed all too much. The delicious red warmth distracted him, deluding him with promises of health and well-being.

“Then at least tamp it down!”, he snapped. “I don’t want to die stoned without benefit of drugs.”

Meilio winced, shook his head slightly and frowned with concentration. The red warmth shrank into a globe around Taenyo’s heart, leaving the rest of his body achingly cold. He could have wept.

“When I found you on that gibbet,” he said, “all you wanted was for me to kill you. I dragged you all the way here, and it looks like we’ve actually won, and now I’m killing you anyway.”

Meilio smiled. “You could have stayed in Avigdal and married and had ten children and thirty grandchildren.”

Taenyo made a rude noise.

Meilio’s mouth twitched. “I’m afraid any plans that I had beyond today pretty much involved you surviving.”

 

When his Father found them, Meilio had already slumped over sideways to the ground. He wasn’t precisely unconscious, just oblivious of anything except the image that Taenyo, too, could see, if he chose to look: two entwined columns of fire in a gathering fog and the red flame feeding itself carefully bit by bit into the guttering silver and blue one to keep it going. The guards had arranged Meilio in the crook of Taenyo’s arm, with his head on his shoulder, and spread Meilio’s cloak over both of them. It was unexpectedly sentimental of them, but he was grateful.

His father glared at him, and Taenyo found himself suddenly thinking of his long-dead mother. “Do take that look off your face!”, she’d said repeatedly to him during the first year of their exile. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll freeze that way?” Had she ever dared say that to her husband? Probably not. Still, if she hadn’t been hit by that falling roof tile...

“He’s dying and taking you with him,” grunted his father, in the tone that said: “I always expected that to happen.”

“Actually, that’s mostly my blood”, said Taenyo. “Meilio’s the only thing that’s keeping me conscious and able to talk.”

“Why?”, his Father demanded, as if he expected some far-reaching and nefarious plan of Meilio’s to be revealed at the last possible moment.

“I don’t know. Perhaps he thought we should say goodbye to one another. He seemed to think that you and Maaqa could handle the rest.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that”, Taenyo agreed. He felt sorry for his father, whose opponents seemed to have a way of deserting him.

Over his Father’s shoulder he caught sight of Maaqa, who had quietly come up behind. “Sorry, Maaqa, I thought it was rather exaggerated, myself, about you being the future and all that, but it looks as if Meilio was right.” Then a memory of salted fields crossed his mind and he said urgently: “Father, do listen to Maaqa. There really, really are some things he understands better than you!”

Maaqa carefully stepped around his uncle and came and knelt beside them. He gently brushed back the chestnut strands that had fallen forward over his brother’s face; then he looked silently across at Taenyo. Taenyo blinked and had to keep blinking furiously. “He wanted to rebuild Caoinear for me”, he said. “We...”

But there seemed to be no way he could complete that sentence, not even if he had been in the habit of discussing such subjects with Maaqa—especially not with his father standing there, looking as if he’d been slapped in his face with a fish.

“It’s all right”, said Maaqa. “I’ll rebuild it for both of you.” Which was— literally—nonsense, of course, but showed Maaqa could be trusted to grasp the essentials.


End file.
